Shadows in Dreams
by Dreams At Dusk
Summary: That she struggled with sleep after Starkiller Base was nothing new. Like a sun rising and setting, it was simply how life was.


It was nothing new to her.

They had a tenuous alliance at best, Rey and sleep. She could remember no time when it had been an easy companion; if those days existed, they predated her arrival on Jakku. Her nights since then came at the iron hand of exhaustion. She fell beneath the tides of sleep because she was pushed and she fought her way back to the surface as quickly as she could. There were too many fears bound up in sleep. It was a vulnerable thing and she had only herself to depend on.

Rey had done what she could over the years. When she was old enough (and that was not very old at all, but the conventions of the Core worlds meant nothing on Jakku), she scavenged a home as she would parts from a ship and moved into a heap of an AT-AT nestled many dunes away from the Outpost. Distance was a shield and a risk together. She rigged traps, she whirled her way across the sands practicing strikes with her staff. And still, at night, her senses strained from where she lay in a sagging hammock, ever wary until exhaustion's weight pulled her down.

Distance was a demon in another way. Ships set down in the yards around Niima Outpost, not on random dunes. What if they came back, and Rey was not there? It was a foolish fear in the daylight - of course they would not rush their search after finally making it back to Jakku. They would wait and they would look and she would see them.

But at night, huddled within the metal shell of her home, it was easy to find her faith slipping. Alternating between cajoling and then threatening herself with the consequences of being too tired on the morrow, chiding herself for being too fearful, calming herself with assurances of 'one day', she would eventually succumb.

So. That she struggled with sleep after Starkiller Base was nothing new. Like a sun rising and setting, it was simply how life was. Rey didn't think of it, anymore than she thought of breathing.

The edges had changed, true. She had lived too long clinging to hope in the desert for its shadows to leave her in sleep, simply because the desert and the hope of her family's return had fled under the light of day. The desire to be unfindable still warred with the need to be found. But new shapes had joined it.

Rey dreamed of Han Solo plunging into nothingness and awoke with her heart hammering, the feel that pending failure on one front had been replaced by the surety of it on another. Lights flared in a snowy forest. Red. Mud and corpses surrounded her beneath curtains of rain. Blue. The weight of something looming, something anticipated, of which she could not quite discern the form.

She got up the next day as she always had. As she stretched and warmed up her body, it was easier to shove the lingering tendrils of weariness to the side. Like always, like breathing.

After her third night on Ahch-To, Luke Skywalker gestured at her when she would have stood after finishing breakfast, a motion of 'wait, stay'. Rey resettled herself, apprehensive. Chewbacca continued his own exit after a brief barked exchange with Luke, to all appearances unconcerned. But then, the Wookiee had known the man longer than Rey herself had been alive.

And Chewie did not seem to feel it was in his hands to convince the galaxy's last Jedi to return to the fold and stand with them against the First Order. Somehow, Rey had found herself in that position. Three days in and she had no sense of whether Luke Skywalker had any intention of leaving the planet with them. He had spoken of the history of the ruins on Ahch-To. He walked her through some beginning meditations. She had seen him watching from afar as she moved through exercises - she could not call them forms - with her staff.

But he had been silent when she tried to tell him of the First Order, of, her voice halting, the news that Kylo Ren had survived Starkiller Base's destruction.

Luke looked at her with those tired, worn blue eyes. He cleared his throat.

"You haven't been sleeping well."

Rey regarded him uncertainly, as if it had just been pointed out that she was breathing. Then, slowly: "No. I…" She stopped. Confiding was not in her nature. She could not imagine why he had asked. What it meant that he _knew._

"At first I thought it was because of all that has happened recently. But it isn't, is it?"

"How do you know that?" She swallowed and her heart beat a little faster.

Luke shook his head, responding to the question she had not voiced. "A Jedi can sense some things through the Force, without…digging. Ahch-To is a very quiet place without anyone else here. I can 'hear' it, if you will - the echoes at night."

Amidst the weariness in his gaze, Rey saw concern. Or perhaps she sensed it - compassion holding forth despite how little he knew her. It sat funny at the notch of her ribs, as it had when she realized Finn had come back for her, when Leia Organa had held out her arms, when. . . . It was a strange feeling. She shifted awkwardly, more at home with bad dreams than this.

"That's just how it is. How it always is. As long as I can remember. I'm sorry it's bothering you. Um, I'll try to…maybe with this meditation thing, I can figure out how to, to keep it…ah, in." She tried a weak smile. The absurdity of it all struck her then: to have come through everything she had, only to wind up projecting nightmares at a Jedi master. _The_ Jedi master. Pink stained her cheeks.

He smiled back at her, gently. "Don't try to close it in, Rey. That sort of thing, it only festers if you do that. But you're right that meditation may be able to help, in another way." He stood up and brushed a bit of dust from his cloak. "We can work on it together if you like. Something to pass the time on the _Falcon._ "

Rey looked up, eyes wide.


End file.
